


Positive Tension

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, canon AU, just horny teens who want to make out, spoilers for 2x08, you will not find any weird/sad stripteases in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 17:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12965103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: Jughead doesn’t like surprises. But for Betty – for tonight – he’ll make an exception.(Or, the one where there are no poles anywhere in the Whyte Wyrm, and Betty and Jughead hook up in the bathroom instead.)





	Positive Tension

**Author's Note:**

> How much do I hate typing the words "Whyte Wyrm"? A lot.
> 
> Anyway - I hope this helps ease some of the pain after that weird, weird striptease and breakup. :)

_I have a surprise for you later._ She says it as her hands slip around his waist, under his jacket; he can feel the light scrape of her nails through his shirt.

Jughead doesn’t like surprises. But for Betty – for tonight – he’ll make an exception.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The party is, if not a stunning success, then at least not a complete disaster. Neither the Ghoulies nor the Black Hood show up, Tall Boy is preoccupied by the karaoke machine, and no one says the name _Penny Peabody_ even once. Toni is manning the bar, and from what Jughead can tell, his father has stuck to soda water with lime the entire night.

Betty finds him alone by the pool table that’s furthest from the front door, arms crossed over his chest, watching Sweet Pea and Fangs butcher _Livin’ On a Prayer_. She presses up against him immediately.  As she stretches up for a brief kiss, her arms loop around his middle, and he lets his hands settle over the curve of her hips, thumbs brushing lightly over the metal buttons running down the side of her skirt.

It’s been like that lately: their hands moving straight to places they used to pause before touching, their mouths drawn together like there’s a cord pulled taut between them. He likes it – _really_ likes it – but he’s still not used to the way their bodies have started fitting together as though by instinct. (It’s unsettling, he thinks, for your limbs to rearrange themselves so thoughtlessly to accommodate another’s.)

Jughead smiles down at her, tugging gently at a piece of hair by her chin. “Are you having fun?”

“I am,” Betty says with a definitive nod. “Are you?”

“Sure.” Jughead shrugs. “My dad seems to be having a great time. Thanks to you,” he adds, dropping another kiss on her temple.

Betty looks pleased, but something near the bar catches her attention, and her mouth curls into a grimace. “So’s my mom,” she says. “It’s kind of disturbing. Normally a wild night is drinking three glasses of chardonnay and going to bed.”

Jughead follows Betty’s gaze to where Alice Cooper stands by the bar in her mini-skirt and heavy makeup. There’s a handful of empty shot glasses on the bar, and her black leather jacket is slung over the barstool behind her. She’s steady on her feet, but the look on her face is incongruous with the steely-eyed woman who had driven them to the prison in near-silence less than a week ago.

“Toni won’t let her drink too much,” he says, and catches the eye of the girl in question behind the bar. Toni looks back at him impassively, her eyes flicking for a moment between him and Betty, and then tilts her head slightly towards Betty’s mother in what seems to be a nod.

“It’s fine,” Betty sighs. “I don’t want to think about her. My mom, I mean.”

She corrects herself quickly, awkwardly, and Jughead pretends not to notice, pretends there’s not still a tiny, dense knot of guilt in the pit of his stomach every time Toni stumbles across the boundaries of the little world he’s been trying so hard to rebuild with Betty.  

(He will tell her. When the time is right, he will tell her. But the longer he waits, the less it feels like a real thing that happened, and the more it feels like something that could nonetheless destroy them.)

Jughead clears his throat. “What _do_ you want to think about?” he asks, placing both of his hands back on her hips.

She leans into him again, hiding her face against his neck. “I don’t know,” she says. “I _was_ thinking about when I slept over last week.”

Desire curls low in his gut as the memory washes over him: Betty in his bed, in his shirt, long, bare legs tangled with his beneath the flannel sheets. They had not had sex that night, but they’d come closer to it than they’d ever come before, and Jughead knows that he’s ready. He’s pretty sure Betty is just about getting there, too.  

“Oh?” he says now, praying his voice won’t crack on the single syllable.

Betty nods, her breath warm just below his ear. “Mm hmm.”

His hand is drifting lower, down past the curve of her hip, and he _knows_ there are people around – people like his dad, her _mom_ – but he can’t bring himself to care. “Anything, um. Specific?”

“Maybe.” Betty pulls back just enough so that she can meet his eyes. “Let’s go somewhere,” she says, taking his hand.

“Go somewhere?” he repeats. “Like…Pop’s, or something?” Even as he says it, he knows that’s not what she’s getting at. The blood rushing away from his head is making him stupid.

“Somewhere private. Like…” She presses her lips together, eyes scanning the room, and then squeezes his hand. “Like here.” Betty starts to walk towards the bathroom, tugging him along after her.

Jughead shakes his head. “Is this my surprise?”

He means it as a joke. But the look she gives him in response nearly makes his heart stop beating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bathroom of the Whyte Wyrm is cramped, with decades’ worth of old band and bumper stickers papering the walls, and a cracked mirror no bigger than a three-ring notebook hanging tenuously over the sink. It’s also very, very gross. When Jughead opens his mouth to tell Betty this, she stops him with a hand on his chest.

“I just want to be alone with you,” she tells him quietly, and the thought of anything in this room other than Betty Cooper’s pink, pouty mouth vanishes from his head.

Betty moves closer, and he bends down to kiss her, his hands finding the dip in her waist. Her lips part beneath his and her mouth is so warm, so wet, so _good._ This is what he wants, too: to be alone, with _her_ , and if the only place they can do that right now is the grungy bathroom of a biker bar – well, Jughead has always believed that beggars can’t be choosers.

After a minute she breaks away, and steps backwards just a foot or two until her back bumps against the wall. Keeping her eyes on his, Betty’s fingers move to the button of her shirt that’s right between her breasts – the top one, the one that he’d noticed right away was one notch lower than where she normally buttoned her shirts.

She slips it open, then the next, and the next, and then her shirt is on the floor, and she’s standing before him in something lacy and black and almost see-through – something he _thinks_ is called a bustier, and he _knows_ is going to make him lose his goddamn mind.

There’s a heavy pause, the air thick between them, and uncertainty flickers across Betty’s face. “Do you like it?” she says, adjusting one of the straps with one hand.

The barest hint of a tremble in her voice is enough to snap him out of his haze. “I do,” he manages to choke out before he’s closed the space between them, kissing her so fiercely she gasps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After he’s kissed her mouth as thoroughly as he knows how, her neck seems like a good idea, and then her chest an even better one. He’s seen her breasts before — saw them last week, in fact — but never like _this_ , heaving against the delicate, scalloped edge of her bra.

Even in her heels she’s too short for the angle to be comfortable, so he grips her behind her thighs and lifts Betty onto the sink. Her legs fold around his waist, her hands pulling at his hair as his head dips down below her collarbone, and then the sink _creaks_ so loudly that he jumps.

“Shit,” Jughead says, tightening his arms around her, lest her weight actually tear the sink out of the wall. “Um—”

“The wall, Jug,” she says, sounding like she’s catching her breath. “Just—”

He has her up against the wall beside the door before she can finish her sentence. She’s surprisingly light, he thinks, and with her legs wrapped around him and his hips pressing hers into the wall behind her, the positioning actually feels fairly stable.

Betty licks her lips and pushes a lock of his hair out of his eyes. “This is fun,” she says, an unabashed smile forming on her face.

“God, Betty,” is all he can think to say in return, and she dips down her chin to kiss him again.

Now that his face is more or less level with her chest, Jughead returns his attentions there, nudging the bra strap that’s already slipping off of her shoulder further down. He puts his mouth on her breast, teeth grazing lightly against the sensitive skin, and he feels her fingers curl tighter into his hair in response.

“That feels really good,” she breathes, arching into him.

“Good,” he mumbles. Jughead presses a kiss in the valley between her breasts, and then tips up his head to kiss her lips again, cupping both of her breasts in his hands. One of his thumbs rubs over her nipple in slow circles, and she makes a noise of pleasure that sounds so _unrestrained_ that it nearly short-circuits his brain.

“I wanna fuck you so bad,” he murmurs against her mouth, and then freezes. The words feel strange on his tongue, like he’s speaking in a language he didn’t even know he understood. He’s never said anything like that to her before.

But Betty’s reaction…her head tips back against the wall, a low whine caught in her throat, and her thighs press in around his hips more tightly, which he didn’t even think was possible.

Unsure what else to do, he returns to her breast, laving his tongue over her nipple. “I’m on birth control,” she says softly, the last word trailing off into a sigh.

“Betty, no,” Jughead half-laughs, lifting his head up to meet her eyes. She looks – dazed; like maybe she’s so turned on she can’t think straight. “Not here. I mean…” He swallows hard. “Right?”

“Yeah. You’re right,” she says, after a moment of hesitation that lasts just a second too long. She pulls him back in again for a sloppy kiss, fingers pressing into the back of his head.

He squeezes his eyes shut and kisses back, but now that the thought’s in his head he can’t force it back out. He pulls away slightly, nudging at her cheek with his nose so she’ll look at him.

“We could go,” he says. “Somewhere else.”

Betty bites her lower lip, even the simple act driving him crazy. “Our parents are both here,” she points out, running her hands over his shoulders. “They’ll notice if we disappear. And my dad’s at home, and _your_ dad lives with you again.”

He groans. She’s right. “I hate everything.”

Betty giggles. “Soon, though,” she says, and leans forward, brushing her lips over his in something he’s not even sure counts as a kiss. “I want to do it soon.”

Before he can answer, someone bangs on the door. “Fuck,” Jughead mutters, and gently places Betty back on her feet. “Uh – just a second,” he says loudly.

“It’s me,” says a voice that’s clearly Toni. “Betty’s mom is looking for her.”

Betty looks at him, her eyes almost comically wide, and grabs her shirt from the floor. Jughead moves so his body will block hers from view, and cracks open the door. Toni’s there, looking unamused.

“I told her I sent you guys into the cellar to bring up another case of Tito’s,” she says. “And she was just drunk enough to believe me, but you should hurry up.”

“Thanks,” Jughead says, and Toni rolls her eyes.

He shuts the door again, and Betty touches his arm. “Do I look okay?”

“Yeah, you look amazing.”

She looks like she can’t decide whether she’s pleased or annoyed. “I mean do I look like I was just half-naked with my boyfriend in a biker bar bathroom.”

“Oh. You do not,” Jughead assures her.

“Okay.” Betty runs her fingers through her hair one more time. “I’ll go first. You just, like, count to thirty.”

“Sure,” he agrees, though he’s pretty sure no one’s going to be fooled by their perfectly-timed reappearance to the party. At least the flannel tied around his waist should help hide the lingering evidence on his part.

“Okay,” she says again, and squares her shoulders. (It’s cute, he thinks, like she’s preparing herself for battle, and not a conversation with her moderately inebriated mother – though to be fair, with Alice Cooper, there was always potential for it to be both.)

Betty stops just as she’s about to turn the doorknob. “I love you, Juggie, ” she says, looking back at him over her shoulder.

Jughead smiles. “I love you, too,” he says, and starts to count.

**Author's Note:**

> I would really really really love to know your thoughts - comments are so so appreciated!


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